Singing about the Unconquerable Instinct in the Inviolate Room

How do I get stuck working this late?! I start off by simply trying to clean up this week's e-mail in my Inbox. (Of course it's piling up on me... I haven't been online for two days while I've been in training!) But I get stuck working on tasks that end up taking forever to complete. And I even don't finish a few. But I've been working on them since coming back to the hotel from dinner & drinks 6 hours ago!

Speaking of dinner & drinks, there was a fun group of 5 of us still hanging out in Waco tonight. (It's funny... there were two women here who very-much reminded me of people I know... one, an old friend from Northwood and another, a good friend's mom! One of these doppelgängers was with the group tonight.) We visited Cricket's, a neat little bar/restaurant in the Warehouse District... which happens to be about 2 blocks from our hotel. This is a cute little downtown-ish area. We're directly across from the Convention Center, within sight of the Brooklyn Bridge prototype (I'll explain when I eventually tell you the fun facts about Waco), and walking distance from anything/everything you'd want in Waco. Well, anything a stick-close-to-the-hotel-business-traveler-not-really-interested-in-exploring-too-much would want.

I'll save my few fun facts about Waco for another post. I've already packed that brochure in preparation for a relatively early departure in the AM. Man... I hope I'm better at getting up tomorrow than I was this morning. Seriously... I went from out cold to downstairs & ready to leave in 15 minutes... TOPS. Obviously, I'm very proud of that fact.

My reading of choice during this trip has been George Orwell's 1984. No, I've never read it! (And, if we're being honest, I bet most of you haven't either.) Anyway, just wanted to share a few quotes with you before I hit the hay. You should know, before I write these out, that this book is pretty darn depressing. It's fabulous, but pessimisticiticicicitic to the Nth degree.

For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?

Now that they had a secure hiding place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. What mattered was that the room over the junk shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.

In reality, there was no escape. ... To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.